Mangano Accused of Manipulating Data in Diablo Canyon Study

Another public health department has taken a closer look at Joe Mangano's work and determined it's fatally flawed. This time it's the Public Health Department of San Luis Obispo County, Califoria.

You'll recall that Mangano most recently released a study claiming all sorts of ailments arose around Diablo Canyon in the wake of its opening.

From the press release (our emphasis in bold):

“As the Health Officer for San Luis Obispo County, I take the health of our residents very seriously, and when a claim was made that excess cancer and infant mortality was occurring in our County, I made it an immediate priority to investigate further. However, upon examination of the report issued by the World Business Academy (WBA) of Santa Barbara, it became evident that flawed methodology and selective exclusion of populations of interest were used to achieve a result not consistent with standard scientific investigation and practice” states Dr. Penny Borenstein, Health Officer of San Luis Obispo County.

The Health Department report shows that selective inclusion and exclusion of zip codes in the analysis contributed to the alleged effects on birth weights claimed in the World Business Academy report. When the analysis was re-run to include excluded zip codes, the effect lessened or disappeared entirely.

As cancer is reported to the State of California, and not the local Health Department, the help of the State Cancer Registry was requested for review of the report findings. The State Cancer Registry examined the report, and found that the use of crude rates in analyzing cancer cases in the County distorted the true change in rates over time. In fact, age adjusted cancer rates have remained unchanged or declined.

Click here to read the entire report.

It was in 2011 that Mike Moyer at Scientific American leveled the same charge at another Mangano study. Wrote Moyer: "[A] check reveals that the authors’ statistical claims are critically flawed—if not deliberate mistruths ... Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering." Popular Mechanics more recently took a closer look at Mangano's research and called it, "junk science."

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